Enormous congratulations to Carina, who defends her PhD and earns her doctorate! Huge thanks to Prof. Brenton DeBoef for travelling from Rhode Island to be the opponent, and thank you to the other committee members who contributed to a great discussion.

Karthik becomes the first student from our group to get his PhD. Congratulations, Karthik! A special thank you goes Prof. Victor Snieckus, who travelled from Canada to provide such an interesting opposition.

Our Research

In a nutshell

We develop new reactions to make organic molecules in greener, cheaper and faster ways. This can be useful to medicine, in materials science and beyond.

We’re interested in new ‘building block’ molecules useful for making almost any type of organic compound from common starting materials. The idea is to simplify synthesis to the fewest number of steps, minimising cost and environmental impact.

Organic molecules have a huge number of C-H bonds, many of which were traditionally considered “unreactive”. We study methods of replacing them with various functional groups, so that more complex molecules can be made more quickly and efficiently.

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Major themes

We approach our research from several directions.

Organometallics

When C-H functionalisation reactions are catalysed by metals, a C-metal bond is formed. We study molecules that contain such bonds for their unique reactivity and what they can tell us about making C-H functionalisation more efficient.